At the Movies (my random, rarely-updated visualization blog)

This is a podcast/blog dedicated to astrophysics movies, particularly themed towards my own interests in getting this in the public eye, through classrooms, planetaria, websites like this one and of course big ones like YouTube. Basically, there’s a huge wealth of simulators making these beautiful and incredibly instructive visualizations, and painfully little being done to really take advantage of it all for relating to the public how cool space and physics can be!

Ok, time for this incredibly sparsely-updated video collection to earn its’ name! I finally feel like I’ve settled in LA, since Jessie and I, together with Chris Hayward and his wife Tara, got to go to the premiere of Terrence Malick’s Voyage of Time. (Featuring, of course, some of our animations). Caltech put together a featurette on it, which you can watch here. Super-fun! If you’re curious, we contributed the animation of galaxies colliding in the first few minutes of the IMAX cut, along with a couple others. You can see more of ours, with additional discussion and narration, here:

Above is a video explaining the breakthroughs and new physics in our “Latte” simulations, the highest-resolution simulations of a Milky Way like galaxy that have ever been run to the present day, presented in Wetzel et al. 2016 (https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.05957)

Sarah Willis, a postdoc at the CfA, wrote a program for SciShow Space on our ‘Totally Metal Stars’ Work: for great explanations and cool movies of the process in action, with smart people commenting, check out:

Rob Crain has set up a vimeo channel for his movies with Typhoon, a visualization tool, mostly designed around cosmological simulations. Some awesome stuff! And good advertising for the EAGLE project, a counterpart to the Illustris simulation, and the next-generation in large-volume cosmological simulations.

In the previous post I dumped a bunch of movies from my own collection on you. Here are some others from the web, which (selfishly) is biased towards my own movies, just because I had the links. Check out the channels though, of these dedicated YouTube users who’ve compiled really great stuff.

That’s all of it -- I’m showing you all the movies I’ve compiled for different talks, and all the ones I’ve made (not just the prettiest ones!). I want whomever is interested to be able to browse them. If you want to use one, please do! Just let me know, so we can make sure proper credit is given where it is due.